Computed tomography (CT) images are widely used for the analysis of the temporal evaluation or monitoring of the progression of a disease. The follow-up examinations of CT scan images of the same patient require a 3D registration technique. In this paper, an automatic and robust registration is proposed for the rigid registration of 3D CT images. The proposed method involves two steps. Firstly, the two CT volumes are aligned based on their principal axes, and then, the alignment from the previous step is refined by the optimization of the similarity score of the image`s voxel. Normalized cross correlation (NCC) is used as a similarity metric and a downhill simplex method is employed to find out the optimal score. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated on phantom images and knee synthetic CT images. By the extraction of the initial transformation parameters with principal axis of the binary volumes, the searching space to find out the parameters is reduced in the optimization step. Thus, the overall registration time is algorithmically decreased without the deterioration of the accuracy. The preliminary experimental results of the study demonstrate that the proposed method can be applied to rigid registration problems of real patient images.

For real-time systems it is important to obtain the accurate worst-case execution time (WCET). Furthermore, how to improve the WCET of applications that run on multicore processors is both significant and challenging as the WCET can be largely affected by the possible inter-core interferences in shared resources such as the shared L2 cache. In order to solve this problem, we propose an innovative approach that adopts a code positioning method to reduce the inter-core L2 cache interferences between the different real-time threads that adaptively run in a multi-core processor by using different strategies. The worst-case-oriented strategy is designed to decrease the worst-case WCET among these threads to as low as possible. The other two strategies aim at reducing the WCET of each thread to almost equal percentage or amount. Our experiments indicate that the proposed multicore-aware code positioning approaches, not only improve the worst-case performance of the real-time threads but also make good tradeoffs between efficiency and fairness for threads that run on multicore platforms.

Java has been increasingly used in programming for real-time systems. However, some of Java`s features such as automatic memory management and dynamic compilation are harmful to time predictability. If these problems are not solved properly then it can fundamentally limit the usage of Java for real-time systems, especially for hard real-time systems that require very high time predictability. In this paper, we propose to exploit multicore computing in order to reduce the timing unpredictability that is caused by dynamic compilation and adaptive optimization. Our goal is to retain high performance comparable to that of traditional dynamic compilation, while at the same time, obtain better time predictability for Java virtual machine (JVM). We have studied pre-compilation techniques to utilize another core more efficiently, preoptimization on another core (PoAC) scheme to replace the adaptive optimization system (AOS) in Jikes JVM and the counter based optimization (CBO). Our evaluation reveals that the proposed approaches are able to attain high performance while greatly reducing the variation of the execution time for Java applications.

Increase in the number of older people due to demographic changes poses great challenges to the social healthcare systems both in the Western and as well as in the Eastern countries. Support for older people by formal care givers leads to enormous temporal and personal efforts. Therefore, one of the most important goals is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of today`s care. This can be achieved by the use of assistive technologies. These technologies are able to increase the safety of patients or to reduce the time needed for tasks that do not relate to direct interaction between the care giver and the patient. Motivated by this goal, this contribution focuses on applications of acoustic technologies to support users and care givers in ambient assisted living (AAL) scenarios. Acoustic sensors are small, unobtrusive and can be added to already existing care or living environments easily. The information gathered by the acoustic sensors can be analyzed to calculate the position of the user by localization and the context by detection and classification of acoustic events in the captured acoustic signal. By doing this, possibly dangerous situations like falls, screams or an increased amount of coughs can be detected and appropriate actions can be initialized by an intelligent autonomous system for the acoustic monitoring of older persons. The proposed system is able to reduce the false alarm rate compared to other existing and commercially available approaches that basically rely only on the acoustic level. This is due to the fact that it explicitly distinguishes between the various acoustic events and provides information on the type of emergency that has taken place. Furthermore, the position of the acoustic event can be determined as contextual information by the system that uses only the acoustic signal. By this, the position of the user is known even if she or he does not wear a localization device such as a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag.

We describe the framework of a data-fuelled, interdisciplinary team-led learning system. The idea is to build models using patients from one`s own institution whose features are similar to an index patient as regards an outcome of interest, in order to predict the utility of diagnostic tests and interventions, as well as inform prognosis. The Laboratory of Computational Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed and maintains MIMIC-II, a public deidentified high- resolution database of patients admitted to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. It hosts teams of clinicians (nurses, doctors, pharmacists) and scientists (database engineers, modelers, epidemiologists) who translate the day-to-day questions during rounds that have no clear answers in the current medical literature into study designs, perform the modeling and the analysis and publish their findings. The studies fall into the following broad categories: identification and interrogation of practice variation, predictive modeling of clinical outcomes within patient subsets and comparative effectiveness research on diagnostic tests and therapeutic interventions. Clinical databases such as MIMIC-II, where recorded health care transactions - clinical decisions linked with patient outcomes - are constantly uploaded, become the centerpiece of a learning system.

It has been proved that information and communication technology (ICT) solutions for personalized health (PHealth) and ambient assisted living (AAL) can support people in their daily life activities. Several solutions have been demonstrated to empower different levels of services through seamless data acquisition and specific users` interaction modalities. Usually services usability and accessibility are handled in the design process and are validated with small users` groups. Moreover, while service design and systems development have been extensively described in literature, service deployment methodologies are not properly addressed and documented. Proper reference guidelines are also missing. The most common methodologies like unified process (UP) or ICONX can cover only the design and the development of PHealth services without a clear description on the following phases such as deployment, service provision and maintenance. These phases present several risks to be taken into account right from the beginning of the implementation of PHealth or AAL services. This paper focuses on the description of a structured methodology to deploy PHealth services and how this process can be supported by integrated software routines and adapting the UP framework in particular the "Transition phase."

People are willing to spend more for their health. Traditional medical services are hospital-centric and patients obtain their treatments mainly at the clinics or hospitals. As people age, more medical services are needed to exceed the potentials of this hospital-centric service model. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of CardioSentinal, a 24-hour heart care and monitoring system. CardioSentinal is designed for in-home and daily medical services. It mainly focuses on the outpatients and elderly. CardioSentinal is an interdisciplinary system that integrates recent advances in many fields such as bio-sensors, small-range wireless communications, pervasive computing, cellular networks and modern data centers. We conducted numerous clinic trials for CardioSentinal. Experimental results show that the sensitivity and accuracy are quite high. It is not as good as the professional measurements in hospital due to harsh environments but the system provides valuable information for heart diseases with low-cost and extreme convenience. Some early experiences and lessons in the work will also be reported.